412 NATURAL SCIENCE [December 
how this would help Professor Schiller; for not even the most fervid 
Lamarckian ever dreamed that the giraffe, when straining at the 
leaves, was intelligently and purposefully directing the develop- 
ment of muscles and bones and the rearrangement of his internal 
and external anatomy generally. Thus the very modifications, on 
which the whole value of his Lamarckian neck rested, were due to- 
blind mechanical action over which he exercised no intelligent con- 
trol. Moreover, it does not appear that Professor Schiller had even 
cleared up his notions of ‘adaptations’ so far as to think of appeal- 
ing to Lamarckism to support his contention that intelligent action 
is responsible for many adaptations ; for in that section he does not 
even mention Lamarck, though soon afterwards he remarks in pass- 
ing (p. 872) that “it is practically certain that some Lamarckian in- 
fluences must affect both the number and the character of the 
variations ’—the metaphysician, with typical assurance and hasti- 
ness, thus dogmatically deciding a question over which our leading 
biologists, who alone are competent to speak authoritatively, are 
hopelessly at variance. 
I pass over the curious passage in which Professor Schiller cites 
the action of the ‘general physical and chemical laws of nature’ as 
barring variations in certain directions, and thus rendering impossible 
the indefinite variation on which Darwin founded his arguments 
(p. 872), and I will not comment here upon his strange citation 
of Bateson’s work on Discontinuous Variation—which he fondly 
supposes to constitute a stumbling-block to Natural Selection—for 
I have already replied to that argument in the columns of Natural 
Setence (May, 1895); but we will pass at once to the concluding 
section of Professor Schiller’s article. This is really suggestive and 
ingenious ; and, had the author excised the first ten pages of his. 
article and retained only the latter part, he would probably have 
stood higher in the opinion of biologists. The pith of this latter 
part of his argument may be stated in very few words, 
Darwin assumed that organisms vary indefinitely in 
every direction, and that the evolution of species is due to the 
action of natural selection in seizing upon and fixing a few among 
these countless variations. Were this assumption a_ literal 
statement of fact, any possibility of interpreting the universe 
teleologically would be barred ab initio; but, if variation be not 
indefinite in every direction, but more frequent in one direction than 
in others, it may be purposive; and thus the ground is cleared for 
building up a new teleology. Now Darwin’s assumption was not 
a statement of fact, but a methodological assumption, exactly 
analogous to the economic assumption of an ideal ‘ economic man, 
1 The same sort of objection might be brought against the first law of motion, and in: 
either case is obviated by the insertion of the words ‘tends to—’ 
